Hello everybody! My name is GavinCMD, but call me whatever you want to! Today I bring to you a new project, and if I'm in the wrong community just lmk. So I am a part of the CFBM19 mod for madden 19. This mod is going to bring back NCAA football to video games! I've also been working on a side project which will change the GUI for the scoreboard. I'm going for a ESPN style box scoreboard. Now I know this seems a bit off topic but hear me through! Madden 19 was programmed on Frostbite 3, and I use a tool called Frosty Editor to mod. The development on this editor has been halted for a while because of some unfortunate events that happened to the developers. Anyway, when going into the legacy viewer you in the tool you are greeted with a bunch of .ast files. These files can be unpacked using a program called OffZip. Once unpacked you are greeted with tons of different files types. Most common being .dds (Intel texture works) and .apt. the culprit being .APT. I did tons of researching, and for the better of the 3 weeks that I've been working on this side project, I was convinced that the .apt files where Almost Plain Text files. But not too long ago I found these forums, along with the OpenSAGE community.

This was a huge breakthrough as I could not figure out what these .apt files where and how to decrypt them. This was the only community I found that knew what in the world I was talking about. In the OpenSage discord, when I started discussing this with them, they where just straight out confused on why EA would still be using such an ancient file format. But anyway, I was able to confirm with them, and a people on this forum page that they did indeed have everything to do with GUI elements.

Great right? All I have to do is throw the .apt file in the program that they told me to (apt2xml / xml2apt) and then everything would be fine and dandy!

Nope!

Turns out the only way these programs read the .apt files was by using the aptdataentryoffset value that was given in the .const file. But from all the .ast files that I have unpacked, I have yet to see any .const file extensions, which leads me to believe that EA hides it somewhere else.

So that's where I am at the moment. So I've decided to take matters in my own hands and make a simple program that has the same purpose of apt2xml , but just with more modern games, like Madden and Fifa!

So I'm here looking for anyone who can aid my process in the project. Proper credit will be given to anyone who helps the progress significantly!

So with that said, CALLING ALL WHO KNOW MORE ABOUT .APT FILES THAN ME!

Anyway thanks for taking the time for reading this, and I hope I can find some people who can help!

tl;dr Developing a program that takes .apt files from modern day games and turns them into .xml files without needing a .const file (but still needing some sort of equivalent.)